Introduction

Whilst everyone is buzzing and creating fancy new Symfony2/Doctrine 2 applications, and perhaps even a shift to new frameworks/no frameworks, a great deal of us are still maintaining legacy apps and will be for some time to come. As these apps grow, we occasionally need to look back and scream at our old code and wonder why we didn’t make it more scalable or use neat optimisation tricks back when it was first conceived. The fact is, many of these “tricks” are not necessary at the time for a virgin app, and we need to develop code that is relevant to the task at hand.

That said, being aware of some of the case studies I will present to you now may help you to optimise old code, but may also allow you to think twice when you are working with new code – as the things I will describe do not take too much time to implement first time round.

“We recently had to implement table prefixes on our tables in Doctrine 2, which turned out to be not so trivial, and led me to a journey inside the Doctrine 2 metadata parser, event hooks and relation mapper. Fun stuff!”